AB Sciex Pte. Ltd has announced the commercial availability of Amplifex™ Reagents, the first of a new family of advanced chemistries designed to boost the performance of mass spectrometers, improve data precision and significantly increase sensitivity beyond conventional limits.

The new reagents join the industry-leading iTRAQ® reagents for proteomics and IDQuant™ standards for pesticide analysis in the company’s intelligently-designed portfolio of mass spectrometry-based tagging chemistries, now called SCIEX iChemistry™ Solutions.

Industry research scientists will be presenting their novel work using these reagents at the ASMS conference in Vancouver this week.

Today, scientists around the world are working on assays that require levels of quantitation not possible with even the most sensitive and robust mass spectrometry instruments.

While mass spectrometry is a powerful technology for compound detection and quantitation, sensitivity can sometimes be negatively impacted by matrix suppression, high background noise levels, poor ionization efficiency or poor compound fragmentation.

With the Amplifex™ Reagents, improvements in sensitivity, compared to even the most sensitive of mass spectrometry instruments, can range from 5x to 1000x, depending on the analyte.

Amplifex™ Reagents are the only derivatizing agents custom designed, synthesized and tested to boost ionization efficiency, improve fragmentation and chromatographic properties, and overcome other workflow restraints that laboratories can face, including minimal available sample volumes.

Among the laboratories that had early access to the new Amplifex™ Reagents was the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center & Institute for Clinical & Translational Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

As part of their study into the metabolomics systems of primates, scientists had struggled to achieve the sensitivity levels necessary to examine 1α,25-Dihydroxyvitamin D3.

After incorporating the new Amplifex™ Diene reagent into their workflow however, their sensitivity dilemma was solved.

“Using Amplifex™ Diene, we were able to achieve LOD of 2 pg/ml on the QTRAP® 5500 system for both 1α,25-Dihydroxyvitamin D3 and 1α,25-Dihydroxyvitamin D2, starting with a sample volume of 200 µL, thereby using half the serum volume we would otherwise have used,” said Toni E. Ziegler, Ph.D., Wisconsin National Primate Research Center & Institute of Clinical & Translational Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Through the use of intelligent chemistry, AB SCIEX is pushing the limits of sensitivity to levels unachievable with current LC/MS/MS methods.”

As part of her research into biomarker discovery for Cerebrotendinous Xanthomatosis disease, the new Amplifex™ Keto reagent enabled a scientist at Oregon Health & Science University to successfully measure low concentrations of specific ketosterols, despite the sensitivity and low sample volume requirements necessary for her research.

“The new Amplifex™ Keto reagent is very easy to use and fast, and it enabled me to achieve sensitivity levels of 2.5-5 pg/ml using only 5ml plasma,” said Andrea DeBarber, PhD., Research Assistant Professor, Physiology & Pharmacology Department, Associate Director, Bioanalytical Shared Resource Facility, Oregon Health & Science University. “I agree that the new Amplifex reagent is truly expanding the boundaries of sensitivity for ketosterol biomarker quantification.”

iTRAQ® and the new Amplifex™ Reagents are a part of a family of SCIEX iChemistry™ Solutions, the world’s only reagents and consumables custom designed for mass spectrometry applications.

“We are not only pushing the limits of sensitivity through instrumentation, but we are also pushing the limits through chemistry,” said Babu Purkayastha, Director of R&D for Consumables at AB SCIEX. “We are known for our iTRAQ chemistries, and with our new Amplifex reagents, we are once again enabling researchers to perform challenging analyses and workflows by mass spectrometry, so they can address key analytical and biological questions. Going forward, we will continue to innovate in this area of advanced chemistries.”

Derivatization is no longer a painful, day-long process. With Amplifex™ Reagents, sample preparation workflows are quick, simple, reproducible and robust as well as yielding higher recoveries than traditional reagents. The first two sets of reagents in the Amplifex™ line are:

• Amplifex™-Diene Reagent - a reagent that can be used to derivatize any molecule with a cis-diene system, including compounds such as Vitamin D3 and Vitamin D2 analogs, such as 1α, 25-Dihydroxyvitamin D3 and 1α, 25-Dihydroxyvitamin D2, among others. The result is a signal enhancement of up to 1000-fold.

• Amplifex™-Keto Reagent - a reagent that is universal and reacts with keto or aldehyde compounds, including ketosteroids, such as testosterone, among others. Signal enhancements improve mass limits of detection by up to 500-fold.

These award-winning solutions provide scientists across a range of fields and disciplines with the ability to conduct comprehensive proteome profiling and quantitation, biomarker discovery and verification, and the full characterization of complex biotherapeutics.